The former Mercedes technical director has revealed how long the team has been hiding the extent of their superiority at the dawn of the V6 hybrid turbo engine era.
Paddy Lowe, who was Mercedes’ technical director when the current power units were launched in 2014, explained why they didn’t use the maximum power mode for most of this season.
Lowe said the team realized how far ahead of the competition they were towards the end of testing before the 2014 season. His engine manager Andy Cowell was initially concerned about the performance and reliability of his new PU105B V6 hybrid turbo.
“I’ve seen Andy’s descriptions of it, many of which we didn’t really know at the time because they were busy with work and didn’t tell everyone what their problems were,” Lowe told the F1 official website. “It was a very, very difficult time and they had absolutely no confidence.
“But I think when we got to the first test, certainly the second test, it became clearer that some others were in desperate disarray and didn’t mention names and that we were in reasonably good shape.
“Then we came up with another upgrade in the Bahrain test, which was literally an add-on product that suddenly made another seven or eight tenths of a horsepower. That was an enormous day. And we knew at that time that we were in a very special area. “
Despite the huge win, Mercedes, powered only by Renault, beat rivals Red Bull by three tenths of a second in a rainy session in Australia to pole position in the first race of the year. According to Lowe, senior figures on the team, including Mercedes motorsport director Toto Wolff, were concerned that Formula 1 could introduce changes to the rules to slow them down if the full extent of their dominance was known.
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“It was exciting, but you had other pressures,” he said. “Imagine the scene: you have Toto and the Daimler board of directors worried about negative politics looking too good.”
Before the start of the season, F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone had vehemently criticized the new regulations for engines.
“They let Bernie go around and said this was all a nightmare, those engines are terrible,” Lowe recalled. “Well the thought was that if Mercedes looked ridiculously good, something would be done about it.”
Mercedes therefore decided to mask their qualifying advantage by reducing the performance of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg’s cars. Lowe said they did so not only in Q1 and Q2, where they could expect to easily outperform their slowest rivals, but also in Q3, where they usually set their final starting positions.
This created “a lot of tension” on the pit wall, Lowe said. “In qualifying we would never crank the engine for Q1 and Q2. It was running in a kind of idle mode. “
The team would then consider whether it would take full force to reach the pole position Wolff often argued against, Lowe recalled.
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“The debate would then be how much the engine needs to be turned on for the third quarter. I would get it in my ear from Toto: “This is too much, this is too much”. And I think ‘but if we don’t get a pole we look like a bunch of cups’.
“So which number you should pick would do the job knowing you weren’t going to be wrong the wrong way? So that was a big part of the discussion on Saturday afternoon. Nice to chat. “
“It actually took a long time,” he added. “For most of 2014 this engine never had full power for qualifying.”
Mercedes clinched pole position in one of the 19 races this year at all bars. They only missed it in Austria, where the Williams Mercedes-powered drivers swept the front row after Hamilton and Rosberg made mistakes in the third quarter.
Lowe said the W05’s engine was only part of the reason for its dominance. “It was a good car too,” he said.
“It wasn’t just the engine, we also had excellent aerodynamics, better than anyone else we followed before, because we corrected all of our data using the engine. And this car was better than any other car, not to mention the engine.
Mercedes took another 18 pole positions out of 19 races in 2015. By the 13th race of the season in Singapore, Sebastian Vettel was able to give Ferrari the first pole position for a V6 hybrid turbo powered by something other than a Mercedes. In 2016 Mercedes clinched 20 pole positions from 21 races.
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